


Night Vale: Sussex: 1895

by ZiGraves



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Alternate Universe - Victorian, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-02 00:57:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1050611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZiGraves/pseuds/ZiGraves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Since everyone else seems to be hopping on the AU bandwagon, it's time for a Victorian AU. Carlos, debonair scientist kicked out of the Royal Society, is not prepared for the particular oddities of a small English village.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Night Vale: Sussex: 1895

**Author's Note:**

> There is no actual Night Vale, Sussex, but there are a number of small, old towns and villages in Sussex, England, which really do attract a lot of hippies and new age types because of a convergence of leylines and the Prime Meridian. It's lovely, green, hilly country, with roads monstrously pot-holed and occasional massive flooding despite half the countryside being at a 45 degree angle.
> 
> You can find me on tumblr, where I answer to zigraves

Wilde is rumoured to have chased him to no avail. It’s said that some of Beardsley’s more creatively licentious illustrations take their inspiration from him. If one looks carefully, one sees his fine profile and lush hair in Lautrec’s paintings. His dark looks echo none other than the late, lamented Lord Byron, the wild poet himself.

He is a tremendously fashionable man, then, the moreso for being so scandalous as to have been thrown out of the Royal Society for charges no one is willing to discuss but which may perhaps relate to some revolutionary approach to Spiritism.

Of course this man is frightfully unattainable, as the most fashionable men always are. Prone to erratic appearances on the social scene to chase information about supposed sightings of the impossible, teasing quotes from tongue-tied socialites before vanishing back into bachelorhood. Considered a fantastically eligible bachelor, with his money, wit and looks, he would be quite a catch if anyone could catch him.

The rogue Moorish scientist is, in short, perfect.

He is also, much to everyone’s distaste, not in London or Paris. He’s gone, it’s rumoured, on a countryside retreat. To a village somewhere in the south, near where the Meridian and several supposed leylines meet. It would be the new summer retreat for all the most artistic and daring members of society, the utmost place to be, if only…

… If only anyone could find it.

Night Vale doesn’t seem to be on any maps.

\---

“... and it’s quite the most scientifically interesting place in all of England,” Carlos finished, standing on the little dais in the village’s church hall. A hand rose at the back of the crowd, attached to a fellow who wore his thumbs jabbed through his braces and a much-repaired shirt. “Yes, there, you sir. Your question about my research here?”

“Is this goin' t'interfere wi’ t’invisible corn harvest? Only the corn’s a good crop this year and I won’t have no interferin’ wi’ my harvest.”

“Ah… no, sir, it certainly shouldn’t. I’ve been assured that the outbuildings I’m renting for my equipment aren’t part of the storage barns for your, er, invisible corn. Which I would like to purchase a sample of, incidentally, if you could stay back after the meeting.” He scanned the crowd for further raised hands. A lady in an outlandish hat waved a gloved hand.

“Leanne Hart, Night Vale Gazette And Parish Journal. Do you intend to stay in our parish for long? Will you be providing interviews on your discoveries and work here?”

“Certainly! Mistress Hart, I should be pleased to provide regular bulletins on the progress of my studies for your publication. It is my intention to remain for so long as the remarkable scientific phenomena of the area persist.”

The remarkable hat seemed to nod almost before the woman beneath it. Another hand appeared in the crowd, belonging to a man who was neither short nor tall, neither fat nor thin - quite unremarkable, in fact, beyond the gleam in his eyes, his wide smile, and the odd object he was pointing toward the stage.

“Cecil Palmer, Night Vale wireless. Will you be needing any assistance in your studies?”

“Well, Mister Palmer…” Carlos blinked at the odd device in the man’s hand. “I do beg your pardon, is that… a portable wireless telegraph? Well, if there is anyone in the greater area with basic training in the scientific method, then I suppose I could provide a stipend.”

Palmer’s smile grew wider and he retracted the device. There were no further questions, and the scientist retreated from his podium with the unsettling feeling that there was more of interest in Night Vale than just the convergence of the Prime Meridian with a number of leylines, the geologically impossible uranium seam which coloured the local glass, and several Roman temples.

The device in Palmer’s hand surely could not have been a portable telegraphy arrangement. There was no way to miniaturise the equipment to such a degree.

\---

The sun had set, leaving a taupe-streaked purple in the sky that defied the atmospheric conditions and which changed too quickly even for Carlos’ ridiculously expensive new rotating-back tricolour camera. By the time it had taken the necessary several minutes to fully expose, the sky would have changed utterly.

And it was not what held his attention just then, anyway.

There was a voice, rich and educated, seeming to come from nowhere at all and flooding the laboratory as the scientist worked late into the night.

“A new man came into our little village today, and he says his name… is Carlos.” The voice purred the name in a manner that would have reduced even the most jaded of Decadents to jelly. “A curious and beautiful name, dear listeners, for a curious and beautiful man. He says he is a scientist. What plans does he have for our little home?”

Carlos was frozen, bolted to the floor by sheer shock until long after the mellifluous voice had moved on to discuss more mundane topics. Something about a new boardwalk of a grandiosity to rival Brighton, which seemed unlikely in a place of steep hills, viciously quick little rivers, and a rare few shallow, easily flooded, muddy ponds. He found his feet freed in the gentle babble of smalltalk that did not directly involve him, and at once began a thorough search of the building and surrounding area for the source of the voice.

There was none, save that the voice became quieter the further he strayed into the woods. It did not sound out of breath, as surely some strange man playing a trick ought to have been after the extensive pursuit through the woods, and had none of the hiss or unsteadiness of a cunningly hidden gramophone. Instead it had moved on to something about a local shooting club, which would henceforth be using nonlethal forms of ammunition. Or perhaps that the guns were all broken.

He stumbled, pursued by the steady voice, out of the woods and onto a short lane leading up to a cottage, and promptly fled for it.

He pulled up short when he noticed the cottage had no shadows in the bright moon light, and that a fox had just run directly through the wall. There were two more, similar, cottages nearby which looked more solid, but his faith in the substance of reality was wearing thin and he did not test them.

The voice narrated his discovery of the house that did not exist, mildly amused, before moving on to an issue regarding the local postal service or lack thereof and a Glaswegian posing as an American Chief of some sort.

Carlos sat down on a low wall that was mercifully real, and began to weep. After a little while, the voice turned to a monologue on just the sort of impossible lights that he and his very small cadre of assistants had come to Night Vale to study. He watched puddles in the rutted lane shiver and ripple as though by the rumbling of some approaching cart or earthquake, and felt nothing at all. The leaves in the trees bordering the narrow space did not move at all, and the voice narrated this also.

In a few minutes more the voice gave way to soft, instrumental music. He would have been reassured if only the pretty melody had not been entirely unfamiliar to him, employing as it did a chord progression surely not dreamt by any sane mind.

But there was the rub, for surely his was not a sane mind. Not when a voice chased him, consistent yet faint, through woodlands and meandered between his own actions and some fevered imagining of a small town gone dreadfully wrong. Surely too many late nights chasing the confessions of drunkards and addicts who claimed to have seen ghosts and spirits had infected his mind with their infirmity, their delirium.

He forced himself to his feet, stalking away from the impossible cottage and the earth tremors that shook nothing but water. The voice faded, and faded, and in time his path took him into the village proper where a few nocturnal souls still had lights burning even at that late hour. His thoughts were entirely his own once more as he wandered down the main street and tried to recall the directions back to his rented buildings, and he would almost have turned off for home if a voice had not called for him from a few yards away.

No. Not a voice.

The voice.

The one that had been announcing, in dark and sinister tones, every minor detail in the life of a village that, if its words were to be believed, was too lethal to even contemplate another moment in. Worse yet, the one that had followed his own actions, every starting moment of horror and impossible observation. It belonged to a man neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. A man wholly unremarkable but for the gleam in his eyes, and the smile on his face. And the object in his hand, no modern telegraphy device but some short wand capped with a ball of metal mesh and girded in some thick-cut alloy, all dull silver in colour and glowing, glowing in that unholy manner of a doomed miner with phosphorus necrosis in his jaw.

Carlos eyed the thing, the glowing, unhealthy metal thing, and fled both the voice and the implement.

The voice followed him when the man did not, sweetly complimenting him, his strong jaw - and was that a joke, that his jaw be brought into this when he had only barely rid his mind of the vision of those unfortunates from yellow phosphorus mines? It was concerned, that voice, and wished him well, and fell silent at last when he stumbled through the door of his rented accommodations and hid himself away under the covers of his new bed.


End file.
